It’s Not So Much that We Have to Go; We Get to Go!

It’s pretty common for people to think they need to attend Sunday worship at least once in a while if they’re members of the church. But that kind of thinking is at odds with the thinking of the first witnesses of the resurrection. They, says the very last sentence in the Gospel of Luke, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God (St. Luke 24:52-53). That doesn’t sound to me as though they worshiped out of obligation—though  worship is certainly obligatory according to the third commandment—but out of joy, the joy of knowing and being convinced that their Lord Jesus, who was given into death, had been raised from the dead, and had appeared to them.

When my family was young, some of the children would ask on occasion whether they had to go to church on a particular Sunday; and they quickly grew to learn what my reply would be: “You get to go to church on Sunday!” Which, of course, is the point. It’s a privilege. While certainly we are supposed to do it, since we are to  remember the Sabbath (which is Christ and His Gospel) by keeping it holy, if that’s as far as the question goes for us, then we’re really missing the point.

No wonder, then, that people are often occasionally rather than regularly attending church on Sunday. For if it is merely the commandment that motivates you, then the motivation will be limited. For the law tells us what to do but doesn’t give us the power to do it. It produces guilt, so it is that out of guilt that we go, whether guilt that we didn’t go last week, or the desire to be free from guilt if we don’t go this week. You are supposed to go, that is most certainly true; but there is much more to it than that.

There is the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and lives and reigns to all eternity; and there is the fact that He, the living Christ, comes to us personally every Sunday in Word and Sacrament. You wouldn’t want to miss that, now would you, honestly?

So maybe a change in thinking is necessary, a new perspective. Think of the coming of Sunday morning as something to anticipate with joy, rather like the joy so many of us sense when Easter arrives, and we can’t wait to be there and hear and sing all the special music, and wear our Easter clothing, and be a part of the excitement. So perhaps next Sunday won’t have as many of the extra trimmings as Easter did, but those are indeed only extra trimmings. The reality is the same, the reason we are there, the heart and core of our faith and life. Christ is there, Christ Himself.

 And it’s true what they say, that every Sunday is in a sense Easter. Every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection of our Lord. Every Sunday He comes to us again. Remember this, that He appeared again on the Sunday after the first Easter, and again after that, and then on the first Pentecost, He “appeared” again, though that time it was a little different. That time, He returned through the preaching of the Holy Apostles who had tongues of fire on their heads. And from that point forward they went forth and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following (St. Mark 16:20).

 And their preaching office continues until the end of the world, as the Lord also preaches through today’s preachers of the Holy Gospel, and through their administration of the Blessed Sacrament feeds His sheep.

 So try to think of it that way: it isn’t so much that you have to go (though you do); it’s that you get to go.